"Hurbinek was a nobody, a child of death, a child of Auschwitz, he looked about three years old, no-one knew anything of him, he could not speak and he had no name; that curious name Hurbinek, had been given to him by us, perhaps by one of the women who had interpreted with those syllables one of the inarticulate sounds that the baby let out now and again. He was paralysed from the waist down, with atrophied legs, as thin as sticks; but his eyes, lost in his triangular and wasted face, flashed terribly alive, full of demand, assertion, of the will to break loose, to shatter the tomb of his dumbness. The speech he lacked, which no one had bothered to teach him, the need of speech charged his stare with explosive urgency: it was a stare both savage and human, even mature, a judgement, which none of us could support, so heavy was it with force and anguish.
None of us, that is, except Henek; he was in the bunk next to me, a robust and hearty Hungarian boy of fifteen. Henek spent half the day beside Hurbinek's pallet. He was maternal rather than paternal; had our precarious co-existence lasted more than a month, it is extremely probable that Hurbinek would have learnt to speak from Henek; certainly better than from the Polish girls who, too tender and too vain, inebriated him with kisses and caresses, but shunned intimacy with him.
Henek on the other hand, calm and stubborn, sat beside the little sphinx, immune to the distressing power he emanated; he brought him food to eat, adjusted his blankets, cleaned him with skilful hands, without repugnance, and he spoke to him in Hungarian naturally, in a slow and patient voice. -After a week, - Hurbinek could say a word, what word? It was difficult to know.
During the night we listened carefully. - It was true, from Hurbinek's corner came a word- it was not admittedly always the same word, but it was certainly an articulated word: or better, several slightly different articulated words experimental variations on a theme, on a root, perhaps a name.
Hurbinek continued his stubborn experiments for as long as he lived. In the following days everybody listened to him in silence, anxious to understand, and among us there were speakers of all the languages of Europe; but Hurbinek's word remained a secret. - Perhaps it was his name, perhaps it meant "to eat" or "bread".
Hurbinek was perhaps three years old born in Auschwitz and had never seen a tree, who fought like a man, to the last breath, to gain entry into the world of men from which a bestial power had excluded him; Hurbinek, the nameless, whose tiny forearm - even his, bore the tattoo of Auschwitz; Hurbinek died in the first days of March 1945, free but not redeemed. Nothing remains of him: he bears witness through these words of mine."
Primo Levi, If This is a Man
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